Still Yawning at the Apocalypse

Why is the world ignoring the latest U.N. climate report?

- By David Wallace-Wells. Illustration by Mark Pernice

In late 2018, the United Nations published its landmark IPCC study “Global Warming of 1.5°C.” Sometimes called the “Doomsday” report, it outlined the dramatic outcomes—150 million additional deaths from air pollution, once-a-century floods hitting every year—if the world became just half a degree warmer than the Paris Agreement’s stated goal of limiting warming to one and a half degrees above the preindustrial average.

To the shock of many scientists and activists who had wondered for years why no one really engaged with flaring climate warnings like these, the report literally changed the world, first inspiring a hyperbolic turn in newspaper headlines, then igniting a wildfire of global alarm that burned bright for several years. That alarm led to the canonization of Greta Thunberg, gave prominence to Extinction Rebellion in the U.K. and the Sunrise Movement in the U.S., and amplified calls here and abroad for a Green New Deal—which is now, as the economic historian Adam Tooze has argued, the basic conceptual model for all new Keynesian government spending globally, however poorly the phrase may poll in red America.